The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

‘Toba Tek Singh’ is one of a number of stories about Partition by
Saadat Hasan Manto, a brilliant, alcoholic Urdu writer who himself
moved from Bombay to Lahore in 1948. It is set in a Lahore asylum
whose inmates are about to be split up according to their religion.
When they are taken to the border for the exchange, the story’s Sikh
protagonist – known as Toba Tek Singh after the town he comes from –
refuses to co-operate. He lies down between the new boundary posts ‘on
a piece of land that had no name’, resisting to the end a displacement
he had expressed no wish to be part of. The story is about the
breakdown of language, and its most memorable line is a piece of
nonsense repeated by Toba Tek Singh: ‘Upri gur gur di annexe di
be-dhiyan di mung o daal of di laalteen.’